Ubuntu cloud chief beats CTO to exit door

Four in charge at Canonical

You can add another name to the board members leaving Ubuntu steward Canonical:Neil Levine, the executive in charge of the Linux's cloud and server maturation.

He has left Canonical for a six-man, venture-capital funded start up called Soba Labs currently in stealth mode and working on cloud systems management. Levine is a co-founder and vice president of product development for Soba, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Levine was with Canonical for just two years but he oversaw the push to turn Ubuntu into the kind of Linux server platform that's capable of letting you easily deploy apps to the cloud. His division handled cloud and server products. That meant he'd work on the integration of Eucalyptus into the Maverick Meerkat release of Ubuntu and was scheduled to worked on improving the ability for cloud frameworks such as Hadoop and Cassandra to interoperate in future versions of Ubuntu server.

The departure of Ubuntu's cloud chief came The Reg learned in early April, ahead of Friday's announcement, that Ubuntu chief technology officer (CTO) Mark Zimmerman has also quit.

Zimmerman was a founding member of the Canonical team who joined in 2004. Ubuntu's CTO didn't say where he was headed but signed off amicably on Friday on the company's blog, saying: "Seven years on, the time is right for me to move on from this role."

Zimmerman plans to remain involved in the Ubuntu community and retain his elected position on the governing Ubuntu Technical Board.

So, three Canonical board members have left in five months: chief operating officer, and Reg contributor, Matt Asay was the first to go in December after just 10 months with the company. He called his decision "difficult" and the move to a mobile startup "a leap of faith".

That leaves Canonical with a board of four people, when it should be eight. The COO's seat has been vacant since Asay's departure. Chief executive Jane Silber is doubling as COO but the plan, Silber said when Asay left in December 2010, is to recruit a replacement.